don’t make promises you can’t keep

Coming up with a good New Years resolution is like figuring out what to blog about every morning. Sometimes you just have to pick something.

Sometimes it’s something easy and obvious…like writing about resolutions…or resolving to eat breakfast every day. Sometimes it’s more nebulous…like telling yourself you’re going to be kinder in the coming year…or that you’re going to work at drawing closer to God.

The resolutions that are harder to pin down are easier to “fudge”.

It’s strange that we have this marker of the jump over into a “new year” to make our promises. I guess it’s kind of nice to have a year-long buffer before we have to figure out something else to improve…it usually doesn’t take long before we’ve forgotten that we had changes to make. Manana….what a beautiful word.

I like the resolutions like “I promise to eat less poptarts…and more bulgur”…who’s going to be able to track my progress with something like that? If you can figure out how to define your conviction with “soft words” you can get away with a lot. All the things that we can “sort of” accomplish…”maybe” something will come together for us in the new year….I “might” be able to handle that.

The promises that we probably can’t do anything about…but that remind us that we have something to feel bad about in the coming year…man…those are the worst. “I resolve to remember every day that I did something bad in the past that I can’t change or erase. I resolve to feel bad…I resolve to feel defeated…I resolve to remember my powerlessness to fix the problems that I can’t touch.”

I am going to go into the New Year with a couple of hard resolutions…not difficult, but hard and fast…attainable and enjoyable…life affirming and positive. I resolve…and they say that to write anything down is the surest way to take it all seriously….well, I resolve to grow my beard every day and to always remember to breathe in the coming year. There…I jump in with both feet and proclaim before the world that some changes will definitely be made in the coming year.

I’ve heard that every day we lose (and replace…don’t worry, Skeltor) about a million skin cells. We are constantly changing…so even if we hit midnight with some angst about the changes to be made…in some respects it’s already happening whether or not we can read a calendar.

I had a camp friend who used to say that his Dad’s motto was “Do something…even if it’s wrong!” So….I guess that we all need to make some promises…and then move on with our lives. Forge ahead…even if we’re doing it wrong.